15 Facts About Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Kate Chopin's groundbreaking novel The Awakening is revered for its realism and regularly included in academic reading lists. Set in the late 19th century, its story follows Edna Pontellier, a wife and mother whose flirtation with a young bachelor leads her to desire more from life. This premise elicited widespread scorn when the book was published in 1899—and its author never could have predicted its rocky road to critical acclaim.

1. THE AWAKENING WAS CHOPIN'S SECOND NOVEL.

Her first novel At Fault, privately published in 1890, centered on a Creole widow named Thérèse Lafirme, who unexpectedly finds love with a dashing divorcé. From there, Chopin began writing for well-known magazines, and published more than 100 short stories and essays in Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, The Century Magazine, and The Youth's Companion. Her next two books, both short story collections, were Bayou Folk (published in 1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). The Awakening, her second novel, was published on April 22, 1899.

2. CHOPIN WAS INSPIRED BY THE WRITING OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT.

The French short story writer is known for his masterpieces of realism. One of his most famous stories, "Boule de Suif," follows the journey of a prostitute during the Franco-Prussian War. Of Maupassant's influence on her work, Chopin said:

"I read his stories and marveled at them. Here was life, not fiction; for where were the plots, the old-fashioned mechanism and stage-trapping that in a vague, unthinkable way I had fancied were essential to the art of story-making. Here was a man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes, and who, in a direct and simple way, told us what he saw."

3. CHOPIN SET MANY OF HER STORIES IN LOUISIANA, INCLUDING THE AWAKENING.

She set At Fault and portions of The Awakening in New Orleans, where Chopin spent many years as a young wife and mother. Chopin reflected the Creole heritage of the area in her characters. Many of her short stories were set in the central Louisiana town of Natchitoches, where she later resided.

4. THE AWAKENING IS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE FIRST FEMINIST WORKS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE.

Chopin's novel arrived during the feminist movement's first wave, when women fought for the right to vote and for increased autonomy. The Awakening's heroine, Edna Pontellier, challenged society's expectations for women by daring to explore romance outside her marriage and gratification outside of motherhood.

5. CHOPIN STRUGGLED AFTER THE DEATH OF HER HUSBAND.

When The Awakening was published, she was a 49-year-old widow who had raised six children. Her husband, Oscar Chopin, had died of malaria in 1882, when Kate was 32. According to biographerEmily Toth, "For a while, the widow Kate ran his business and flirted outrageously with local men." Two years later, she sold the business (a general store and plantation) and moved to St. Louis to be closer to her mother. There, Chopin's obstetrician and family friend, Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, suggested writing might pull her out of a growing depression. She found a new passion and purpose.

6. CHOPIN BECAME A RESPECTED WRITER OF REGIONAL STORIES.

The Kate Chopin House in Nachitoches Parish, Louisiana, circa 1933. The house burned down in 2008.

Ahead of The Awakening's debut, Chopin was at the height of her popularity. Critics praised both of her short story collections, and heralded A Night in Acadie as "a string of little jewels." She was celebrated for her observations and ability to capture "local color." Posthumously, her works would continue to be revered as grand examples of American realism at the turn of the century. This literary movement depicted the everyday lives of ordinary, contemporary people with keen and humane observations.

7. THE AWAKENING EARNED NEGATIVE REVIEWS ...

Chopin's story of self-discovery and suicide boldly challenged the gender roles of Victorian society. Critics denounced the novel as "morbid," "feeble," and "vulgar." "Miss Kate Chopin is another clever woman, but she has put her cleverness to a very bad use in writing The Awakening," sniffed an anonymous reviewer in the Providence Sunday Journal. "The purport of the story can hardly be described in language fit for publication. We are fain to believe that Miss Chopin did not herself realize what she was doing when she wrote it."

The Los Angeles Sunday Times scolded, "It is rather difficult to decide whether Mrs. Kate Chopin, the author of The Awakening, tried in that novel merely to make an intimate, analytical study of the character of a selfish, capricious woman, or whether she wanted to preach the doctrine of the right of the individual to have what he wants, no matter whether or not it may be good for him."

Perhaps harshest of all was Public Opinion's review, which celebrated Edna's eventual drowning. "If the author had secured our sympathy for this unpleasant person it would not have been a small victory, but we are well satisfied when Mrs. Pontellier deliberately swims out to her death in the waters of the gulf," the critic wrote.

8. ... BUT EVEN CRITICS WHO WERE UNNERVED BY CHOPIN'S PLOT PRAISED HER CRAFT.

Frances Porcher, reviewing for The Mirror, lamented that Chopin's novel ultimately left her feeling "sick of human nature," but wrote, "there is no fault to find with the telling of the story; there are no blemishes in its art."

L. Deyo of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch acknowledged The Awakening's subversive elements, but argued that its artistry superseded its shock value. "The theme is difficult, but it is handled with a cunning craft," Deyo wrote. "The work is more than unusual. It is unique. The integrity of its art is that of well-knit individuality at one with itself, with nothing superfluous to weaken the impression of a perfect whole."

9. THE OUTCRY WOUNDED CHOPIN—AND HER CAREER.

Despite all the praise her short stories had earned, the critical response to The Awakening crushed Chopin's spirits. The St. Louis Fine Arts Club, which she sought to join, barred her admission because of the scandal. She wrote more short stories but struggled to find publishers. Toth argues that Chopin's challenge to society's patriarchal status quo in The Awakening "went too far: Edna's sensuality was too much for the male gatekeepers."

10. THE AWAKENING WAS CHOPIN'S LAST NOVEL.

Five years after its publication, the St. Louis-born author died after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while she was visiting the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

11. FOR DECADES, IT SEEMED THAT THE AWAKENING WOULD BE FORGOTTEN.

Following her death, critics and readers remembered her most often for her short stories. Her legacy remained that of a "local colorist"; the regional elements of her short stories were valued more highly than The Awakening's theme of female empowerment.

12. APPRECIATION FOR THE AWAKENING GREW IN THE MID-20TH CENTURY.

By the early 1960s, second-wave feminism was changing the way Americans viewed women and society at large. In 1969, Per Seyersted, a scholar of American literature, secured Chopin's literary legacy by publishing the first edition of her collected works. He also wrote Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. The former allowed generations of readers to discover her writing, while the latter reconsidered The Awakening, and celebrated "its courageous realism." Both books kicked off a reevaluation of Chopin and her once-notorious novel.

13. THE AWAKENING HAS BEEN BANNED—BUT ONLY ONCE.

Though book jackets like to claim that it's been banned, historians have found of only one verified instance when The Awakening was pulled from library shelves. A popular story claims that a library in Chopin's hometown of St. Louis removed the novel. But in all her research, Toth could not verify this. However, The New York Times reported The Awakening was banned from a public library in Evanston, Illinois in 1902. And its placement was challenged at Georgia's Oconee County Library in 2010. That incident wasn't related to the controversial content of the novel, but to its cover showing a painting of a semi-nude woman, which upset a library patron.

14. THE AWAKENING IS CONSIDERED A CLASSIC.

Contemporary critics and academics recognize that Chopin was ahead of her time by almost 100 years. In Awakenings: The Story of the Kate Chopin Revival, editor and Chopin authority Bernard Koloski summarized the incredible journey of The Awakening's rise to the American literature canon:

"No other American book was so maligned, neglected for so long, and then embraced so quickly and with such enthusiasm as Kate Chopin's 1899 novel The Awakening. And none has been so thoroughly redeemed as The Awakening. Thought vulgar, morbid, and disturbing in Chopin's time, it has for the past quarter of a century been seen as sensitive, passionate, and inspiring. Forgotten for two generations, it is today known by countless people in dozens of countries, and Kate Chopin has become among the most widely read of classic American authors."

15. BECAUSE OF THE AWAKENING, CHOPIN'S WORK CAN BE READ AROUND THE WORLD.

Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella about venturing into the moral depths of colonial Africa is among the most frequently analyzed literary works in college curricula.

1. ENGLISH WAS THE AUTHOR’S THIRD LANGUAGE.

It’s impressive enough that Conrad wrote a book that has stayed relevant for more than a century. This achievement seems all the more impressive when considering that he wrote it in English, his third language. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, Conrad was a native Polish speaker. French was his second language. He didn’t even know any English—the language of his literary composition—until age 21.

2. HEART OF DARKNESS BEGINS AND ENDS IN THE UK.

Though it recounts Marlow's voyage through Belgian Congo in search of Kurtz and is forever linked to the African continent, Conrad’s novella begins and ends in England. At the story’s conclusion, the “tranquil waterway” that “seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” is none other than the River Thames.

3. THE PROTAGONIST MARLOW IS CONRAD.

The well-traveled Marlow—who appears in other Conrad works, such as Lord Jim—is based on his equally well-traveled creator. In 1890, 32-year-old Conrad sailed the Congo River while serving as second-in-command on a Belgian trading company steamboat. As a career seaman, Conrad explored not only the African continent but also ventured to places ranging from Australia to India to South America.

4. LIKE KURTZ AND MARLOW, CONRAD GOT SICK ON HIS VOYAGE.

Illness claimed Kurtz, an ivory trader who has gone mysteriously insane. It nearly claimed Marlow. And these two characters almost never existed, owing to their creator’s health troubles. Conrad came down with dysentery and malaria in Belgian Congo, and afterwards had to recuperate in the German Hospital, London, before heading to Geneva, Switzerland, to undergo hydrotherapy. Though he survived, Conrad suffered from poor health for many years afterward.

5. THERE HAVE BEEN MANY ALLEGED KURTZES IN REAL LIFE.

The identity of the person on whom Conrad based the story’s antagonist has aroused many a conjecture. Among those suggested as the real Kurtz include a French agent who died on board Conrad’s steamship, a Belgian colonial officer, and Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley.

6. COLONIZING WAS ALL THE RAGE WHEN HEART OF DARKNESS APPEARED.

Imperialism—now viewed as misguided, oppressive, and ruthless—was much in vogue when Conrad’s novella hit shelves. The "Scramble for Africa" had seen European powers stake their claims on the majority of the continent. Britain’s Queen Victoria was even portrayed as the colonies' "great white mother." And writing in The New Review in 1897, adventurer Charles de Thierry (who tried and failed to establish his own colony in New Zealand) echoed the imperialistic exuberance of many with his declaration: “Since the wise men saw the star in the East, Christianity has found no nobler expression.”

7. CHINUA ACHEBE WAS NOT A FAN OF THE BOOK.

Even though Conrad was no champion of colonialism, Chinua Achebe—the Nigerian author of Things Fall Apart and other novels—delivered a 1975 lecture called “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” that described Conrad as a “thoroughgoing racist” and his ubiquitous short classic as “an offensive and deplorable book.” However, even Achebe credited Conrad for having “condemned the evil of imperial exploitation.” And others have recognized Heart of Darkness as an indictment of the unfairness and barbarity of the colonial system.

8. THE BOOK WASN’T SUCH A BIG DEAL—AT FIRST.

In 1902, three years after its initial serialization in a magazine, Heart of Darkness appeared in a volume with two other Conrad stories. It received the least notice of the three. In fact, not even Conrad himself considered it a major work. And during his lifetime, the story “received no special attention either from readers or from Conrad himself,” writes Gene M. Moore in the introduction to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: A Casebook. But Heart of Darkness managed to ascend to immense prominence in the 1950s, after the planet had witnessed “the horror”—Kurtz's last words in the book—of WWII and the ramifications of influential men who so thoroughly indulged their basest instincts.

9. T.S. ELIOT BORROWED AN IMPORTANT LINE.

Though Heart of Darkness wasn’t an immediate sensation, it evidently was on the radar of some in the literary community. The famous line announcing the antagonist’s demise, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” serves as the epigraph to the 1925 T.S. Eliot poem “The Hollow Men.”

10. THE STORY INSPIRED APOCALYPSE NOW.

Eighty years after Conrad’s novella debuted, the Francis Ford Coppola film Apocalypse Now hit the big screen. Though heavily influenced by Heart of Darkness, the movie’s setting is not Belgian Congo, but the Vietnam War. And though the antagonist (played by Marlon Brando) is named Kurtz, this particular Kurtz is no ivory trader, but a U.S. military officer who has become mentally unhinged.

11. HEART OF DARKNESS HAS BEEN MADE INTO AN OPERA.

Tarik O'Regan’s Heart of Darkness, an opera in one act, opened in 2011. Premiering at London’s Royal Opera House, it was reportedly the first operatic adaptation of Conrad’s story and heavily inspired by Apocalypse Now.

12. THE BOOK ALSO SPARKED A VIDEO GAME.

In a development not even Conrad’s imagination could have produced, his classic inspired a video game, Spec Ops: The Line, which was released in 2012.

Toni Morrison—who was born on February 18, 1931—made a name for herself with The Bluest Eye, Sula and Song of Solomon, but it wasn’t until 1987’s Beloved, about a runaway slave haunted by the death of her infant daughter, that her legacy was secured. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and was a key factor in the decision to award Morrison the Nobel Prize in 1993. All the awards aside, Beloved is a testament to the horrors of slavery, with its narrative of suffering and repressed memory and its dedication to the more than 60 million who died in bondage. Here are some notable facts about Morrison’s process and the novel’s legacy.

1. IT’S BASED ON A TRUE STORY.

While compiling research for 1974's The Black Book, Morrison came across the story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave from Kentucky who escaped with her husband and four children to Ohio in 1856. A posse caught up with Garner, who killed her youngest daughter and attempted to do the same to her other children rather than let them return to bondage. Once apprehended, her trial transfixed the nation. "She was very calm; she said, 'I’d do it again,'" Morrison told The Paris Review. "That was more than enough to fire my imagination."

2. MORRISON CAME UP WITH THE CHARACTER BELOVED AFTER SHE STARTED WRITING.

The book was originally going to be about the haunting of Sethe by her infant daughter, who she killed (just as Garner did) rather than allow her to return to slavery. A third of the way through writing, though, Morrison realized she needed a flesh-and-blood character who could judge Sethe’s decision. She needed the daughter to come back to life in another form (some interpret it as a grief-driven case of mistaken identity). As she told the National Endowment for the Arts’ NEA Magazine: "I thought the only person who was legitimate, who could decide whether [the killing] was a good thing or not, was the dead girl."

3. SHE WROTE THE ENDING EARLY IN THE WRITING PROCESS.

Morrison has said she likes to know the ending of her books early on, and to write them down once she does. With Beloved, she wrote the ending about a quarter of the way in. "You are forced into having a certain kind of language that will keep the reader asking questions," she told author Carolyn Denard in Toni Morrison: Conversations.

4. MORRISON BECAME FASCINATED WITH SMALL HISTORICAL DETAILS.

To help readers understand the particulars of slavery, Morrison carefully researched historical documents and artifacts. One particular item she became fascinated with: the "bit" that masters would put in slaves' mouths as punishment. She couldn’t find much in the way of pictures or descriptions, but she found enough to imagine the shame slaves would feel. In Beloved, Paul D. tells Sethe that a rooster smiled at him while he wore the bit, indicating that he felt lower than a barnyard animal.

5. SHE ONLY RECENTLY READ THE BOOK HERSELF.

In an appearance on The Colbert Report last year, Morrison said she finally got around to reading Beloved after almost 30 years. Her verdict: "It’s really good!"

6. THE BOOK INSPIRED READERS TO BUILD BENCHES.

When accepting an award from the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1988, Morrison observed that there is no suitable memorial to slavery, "no small bench by the road." Inspired by this line, the Toni Morrison Society started the Bench by the Road Project to remedy the issue. Since 2006, the project has placed 15 benches in locations significant to the history of slavery and the Civil Rights movement, including Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, which served as the point of entry for 40% of slaves brought to America.

7. WHEN BELOVED DIDN’T WIN THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN 1987, FELLOW WRITERS PROTESTED.

After the snub, 48 African-American writers, including Maya Angelou, John Edgar Wideman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., signed a letter that appeared in the New York Times Book Review. "For all of America, for all of American letters," the letter addressing Morrison read, "you have advanced the moral and artistic standards by which we must measure the daring and the love of our national imagination and our collective intelligence as a people."

8. IT’S ONE OF THE MOST FREQUENTLY CHALLENGED BOOKS.

Between 2000 and 2009, Belovedranked 26th on the American Library Association’s list of most banned/challenged books. A recent challenge in Fairfax County, Virginia, cited the novel as too intense for teenage readers, while another challenge in Michigan said the book was, incredibly, overly simplistic and pornographic. Thankfully, both challenges were denied.

9. MORRISON ALSO WROTE AN OPERA BASED ON GARNER’S LIFE.

Ten years ago, Morrison collaborated with Grammy-winning composer Richard Danielpour on Margaret Garner, an opera about the real-life inspiration behind Beloved. It opened in Detroit in 2005, and played in Charlotte, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York before closing in 2008.

10. MORRISON DID NOT WANT IT MADE INTO A MOVIE.

Although she publicly claims otherwise, according to a New York magazine story, Morrison told friends she didn’t want Beloved made into a movie. And she didn’t want Oprah Winfrey (who bought the film rights in 1988) to be in it. Nevertheless, the film came out in 1998 and was a total flop.

11. THERE'S AN ILLUSTRATED VERSION.

The Folio Society, a London-based company that creates fancy special editions of classic books, released the first-ever illustrated Beloved in 2015. Artist Joe Morse had to be personally approved by Morrison for the project. Check out a few of his hauntingly beautiful illustrations here.